Chicago Architecture Biennial 2015: Sou Fujimoto Architects has produced an installation consisting of every day products, from potato chips to an ashtray, that signify the Japanese firm’s philosophy that “architecture is 1st identified and then made”.
Titled Architecture Is Everywhere, the set up was developed for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which opened three October and runs to three January 2016.
The company has placed every day objects – paired with tiny plastic human figures – atop dozens of modest, wooden tables. The objects contain potato chips, clothespins, staples, ping-pong balls and a ceramic ashtray.
The tables are evenly dispersed in one particular of the gallery rooms in the Chicago Cultural Center – the major exhibition venue for the Biennial. Site visitors are invited to walk via the grid of tables and examine the objects up near.
“The notion of ‘found architecture’ is represented by juxtaposing human figures and ordinary objects discovered in daily existence, with contexts that might seem coincidental at 1st, if not fortuitous,” said the company. “This operation helps make us to commence to read these objects as architectural spaces.”
“One particular of the key tips behind Sou Fujimoto’s practice is that architecture is 1st located and then produced,” the firm added. “Just as our ancestors located their habitat in caves and woods, we learn ours between the many factors we experience in the immense urban jungle.”
The company said its strategy can be traced back to “readymades” by Marcel Duchamp, his famed artwork pieces manufactured of everyday objects, such as a comb or a porcelain urinal.
Connected story: Sou Fujimoto stacks aluminium boxes to type “nomadic” property set up in Paris
The company also cited work by music composer John Cage, this kind of as a concert in which musicians played no music and the focus rather was on the fundamental sounds made by audience members.
“Architecture is All over the place aims to radically query the boundary between ‘found’ and ‘made’ architecture,” mentioned the firm.
Sou Fujimoto Architects was founded in 2000 in Tokyo. In 2013, Sou Fujimoto grew to become the youngest architect to design and style the yearly summer pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery in London. His other tasks variety from a “nomadic” house installation in Paris to the Musashino Artwork University Museum and Library in Tokyo.
Associated stories: see all our stories about Sou Fujimoto
Installations on view at the Chicago Architecture Biennial contain a prototype for low-price housing by Vo Trong Nghia Architects, a rock sculpture constructed by a robot, and a proposal for a utopian city by WORKac and Ant Farm.
Described by curators Sarah Herda and Joseph Grima as a “internet site of experimentation,” the Biennial characteristics work by far more than a hundred designers all around the globe. The three-month-long occasion consists of installations, exhibitions and occasions.
Photography is by Tom Harris, copyright Hedrich Blessing. Courtesy of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
